THE PRESENT AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 



THE 

INTERNAL CONDITION 

OF THE 

AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 

CONSIDERED, 

IN 

A LETTER 

FFwOM 

THE HON. THOMAS D'ARCY M'GEE, M.P. 

PRESIDENT OF THE EXECUTIVE COUNCIL OP THE 
PROVINCE OP CANADA, 

TO 

THE HON. CHARLES GAVAN DEIFY, M.P. 

MINISTER OP PUBLIC LANDS OP THE COLONY OP 
VICTORIA. 



LONDON: 
SOBEKT HABDYVICKE, 192, PICCADILLY. 
1863. 



Mis 



LONDON : 

cox and wyman, printers, great queen street, 
lincoln's-inn-ttelds. 



I? 



ADVERTISEMENT. 



This Letter was written last year, by the Canadian 
statesman whose name it bears, to his former col- 
league of the Nation and the Irish Confederation, 
the present Minister of Public Lands at Melbourne. 
It will, perhaps, be considered worthy of an English 
edition — partly because Mr. M'Gee from a long 
residence in the United States, and a diligent study 
of their politics and their institutions, speaks with 
authority on the causes of what Mr. Disraeli has 
since, in his speech on the. Address, called their 
present " Revolution ; " partly also because his views 
are a valuable contribution to the public opinion of 
two great colonies, especially liable to be infected 
by the worst principles of the American political 
system. The difficulty, with which Mr. M'Gee 
admits the possible success of the South in its 
present contest with the North, will surprise some 
of his English readers. But his views upon this 
point are shared by many of that class in Canada, 
who have most thoroughly studied the public 
affairs of the great Commonwealth to which their 
country adjoins : and such views count for some- 
what in the attitude which that Province has ob- 
served during the past year — an attitude which has 
been so much misunderstood and so absurdly assailed 
in England. 

J. a H, 

London, \§th March, 1863, 



A LETTER, 

4-c 



" Democracy, as it seems, must next be considered, how it 
arises, and, when once arisen, what kind of man it produces." 
—Plato, The Eepublic, Book VIII. chap. 10. 

My Dear Duffy, — It is now nearly twenty 
years since we canvassed together the merits of the 
late Alexis De Tocqueville's work, " Democracy in 
America." The first part of that work came from 
the press, if I remember aright, about the year 
1833, when the first Reformed Parliament had 
just assembled at Westminster, when the " Citizen 
King" sat on the throne of France, and when Andrew 
Jackson had been chosen a second time to the 
Presidency of the United States. It was an era of 
Democratic ascendancy, and De Tocqueville's mind, 
finely balanced as it was, was probably not unaf- 
fected by the reigning coincidences. When the 
complete work fell into our hands, we adopted 
most of his well-weighed and well- worded conclu- 
sions, or dissented from them, when we did dissent, 
not without a respectful hesitation and regret. 

Though but thirty years have elapsed since M. de 
Tocqueville made his American tour, new facts have 
accumulated so rapidly in America, that if he were 
now to go over the same ground, familiar as he was 
with it formerly, much of his work would probably 
be re-written. Not that his main conclusions on the 
incompatibility of slavery and freedom, the inherent 
weakness of the Federal bond, the downward ten- 
dency of manners, or the phenomena of democratic 
armies, would be revoked; but he would find, it seems 
to me, that causes to which he assigned a long date 



6 



had already borne their natural fruits. He would 
find that many of those predictions of 1833, which 
apparently depended on ages for their fulfilment, had 
already come to pass ; and that Time, for these new 
communities, travels faster and with a fuller wallet 
than for the rest of the world. 

A former residence of several years in the Republic, 
and my present near neighbourhood to it, enable 
me to gratify in some particulars the keen curiosity 
with which you observe the American problem from 
your far Australian home. It is, indeed, for all 
lovers of well-regulated liberty, a study of the 
deepest and most painful interest. How much of 
the destiny of our new and your newer world is hidden 
under the dust and smoke of this conflict, the Author 
of all existence only knows. How much the Old 
World has at stake in the result, no human wisdom 
can presume to predict. If, by reason of my nearness 
to the stage, from which (so I fancy, at least) I can 
sometimes catch the whisper of the prompters behind 
the scenes, and several of the actors on which are to 
me tolerably familiar figures, I can add anything to 
your knowledge of the causes which are operating 
these eventful changes — if I can deduce from the 
consideration of these causes any hints serviceable 
to our free colonial communities, I shall feel that 
my wanderings westward from the common father- 
land have not been altogether barren of useful 
lessons. 

One thing our old instructor, De Tocqueville, 
clearly saw, that the rise of the American Demo- 
cracy was natural and inevitable. In the primitive 
township governments, he found the germ of Ameri- 
can Republicanism, which was to be harvested, not 
sown, by the Revolution of 1776. The colonies 
belonged to the Commons from the beginning, and 
from the very circumstances of their settlement. 
The British Crown did not emigrate, as that of 



7 



Portugal did afterwards to Brazil, nor was there 
any viceroyalty attempted on a scale commensurate 
with the importance of the country. The aris- 
tocracy did not emigrate, except in the army or in 
office, and then only to return. The embryo native 
aristocracy, slowly emerging out of the walks of 
commerce and the learned professions, were not 
sufficiently numerous or united to exercise any 
lasting control after the establishment of inde- 
pendence, though their pow r er w 7 as far from incon* 
siderable in the original Congress. Three thousand 
heads of notable families, on the final establishment 
of the Republic, preferred exile and loyalty to sub- 
mission, and were relieved from the Imperial 
Treasury at half the cost of West Indian eman- 
cipation — ten millions sterling ! What remained in 
the new confederacy of the old colonial patricians, 
reunited by the veteran officers of the revolutionary 
army — the comrades in arms of the French noblesse — 
wielded a large occasional influence under the six 
first Presidents — even under Jefferson. Though 
intellectually a Jacobin, Jefferson was, by age and 
education, a colonial gentleman, and retained 
enough of his early friendships not to exclude 
altogether the accomplished men and women of 
that era from the inner circles of governmental in- 
fluence. It w T as during Jackson's eight years, ending 
in 1837, that the new manners and new tone had 
their first great national triumph. Socially, Presi- 
dent Quincey Adams was the last of the Repub- 
licans, and President Jackson was the first of the 
Democrats. 

The social authority thus gradually eliminated 
from American society was never, perhaps, so much 
an appreciable quantity as a quality inherent, under 
various modifications, in all classes of the original 
United States' people. The social revolution by 
which it was overthrown was for many years re- 



s 



tarded by the Senate, the judges, the bar, the 
faculty, the older collegiate institutions, and the 
merchants of " the old school." The extension of 
population beyond the Alleghanies, the rough vigour 
of frontier life, the new men thrown by the wilder- 
ness into the national councils, broke down at 
Washington, in the most conspicuous centre of 
Republican rule, all the settled barriers and salu- 
tary observances of the old manners and old .habits 
of thought. General Jackson, put forward and 
sustained by the new State of Tennessee — Mr. 
Douglas, put forward and sustained by the 
still newer State of Illinois, are illustrations 
of the rapid declension of official character. 
There was great native dignity, I am told by 
all who knew him, about General Jackson in his 
moments of action and anger ; but neither in his 
treatment of his cabinet, nor of foreign powers, nor 
his choice of favourites, was he guided by that fine, 
all-respecting sense of propriety, which may be called 
the sixth sense of a gentleman. Mr. Douglas, a man 
of wonderful energy, felt the necessity in his latter 
days of attempting a part of authority to which he 
was — except by his talents alone — quite unfitted. 
In the days when he made his popularity, and in the 
prevailing party of those days, it was utterly impos- 
sible for any man, however distinguished, to exercise 
authority. Mr. Clay and Mr. Benton, though both 
Western men, were constitutionally of the older 
school; and, not unnaturally, the former was the 
determined enemy of Jackson, and the latter of 
Douglas. Of the other eminent statesmen of the 
last age, Mr. Webster and Mr. Calhoun were from 
old settled communities, and bore their stamp. 
Mr. Marcy seemed to pride himself in the brusquerie 
of a grazier, while Mr. Cass retained something of 
the ceremonial manner which he had acquired as 
Ambassador to France. 



9 



But we have known one chief magistrate to re- 
ceive his friends while warming his naked feet at 
the fire; a secretary of state addressing a Tammany 
mob in his shirt-sleeves ; and a commander-in-chief 
speaking from the balcony of his hotel sans culottes, 
and jesting on the circumstance in his speech. How 
different was the standard of manners, when Gover- 
nor Hancock, of Massachusetts, declined to receive 
General Washington for three days together on a 
nice point of official precedence, and when Washing- 
ton himself drove to open the first Congress under 
the Constitution of 1789, in a coach and six, with 
outriders and footmen in buff and blue ! 

Of the recent Presidents, seven of whom we 
have seen, and four or five of whom are still living, 
it is hardly permissible to speak freely. Able and 
amiable men they undoubtedly were; but with 
the exception of Mr. Van Buren, and, perhaps, 
Mr. Buchanan, there was nothing strikingly superior 
in any of them. Explain it as they will, it is cer- 
tainly a national misfortune when a succession of 
chief magistrates, raised electorally to the head of 
a great state, fail to inspire those who approach 
them with some degree of veneration. General 
Jackson, with all his levelling tendencies, did this 
by virtue of his headlong courage and decision ; 
but he was the last President of whom this could 
be said. Some of the great senators who failed to 
reach the Presidency attained to the better dominion 
in the hearts of their friends ; yet it was commonly 
remarked of them, that the sterling qualities which 
endeared them to their friends — that their very 
superiority was the main cause of defeating them 
as Presidential candidates. 

I cannot but think also that a fatal inroad on the 
distinctions upheld by manners among Americans 
was made by the much-lauded Common School 
system of the Free States. It is a system mainly 



10 



the work of this generation, and this generation is 
mainly its work. Originating in Massachusetts 
some thirty years ago, it has been extended by the 
power of puffing and the fear of being thought 
retrograde over the whole of the North and West. 
It proceeds on the dangerous assumption that the 
children belong to the State ; that mere school 
learning in youth will lead to punishment-saving in 
afterlife; that the public teacher may forestall the 
constable, and lighten the criminal calendar of half 
its horrors. The Common School, thus constituted, 
is the Democracy of boys, and diffuses an equality 
of manners, of which the average level in towns 
and cities, from one set of causes, and in rural dis- 
tricts from another, must needs be low. The 
parental office — the only magistracy cognisable to 
the youthful mind — is eliminated from the most im- 
portant processes in the formation of character, and 
an inbred insensibility to the special claims of age and 
authority is the result produced by the agency, and 
at the cost of the State. You and I have been 
always advocates for cheapening the means and aids 
of education, and for recognizing intelligence as a pri- 
vileged estate of the realm ; but it does not follow 
that because we hold the State bound to aid and 
encourage Education, that therefore we concede to 
her the rights and duties of the aggregate parentage, 
or the establishment of one uniform system of 
mental and moral training, to the exclusion of every 
competitive system. On this subject Adam Smith is 
not yet obsolete ; and he, you remember, was as zeal- 
ous for freedom of public teaching, as he was for free- 
dom of commerce. The American economists and 
educationists have, however, long ago gone beyond 
his authority, though I do not think they have yet 
answered all his arguments. Where the preliminary 
education is in common — whether the pupils be in- 
tended for the pulpit, the exchange, the bar, or the 



11 



sea —it is impossible that the first stratifications of 
character should not be laid on a low level. By 
such a process a forced uniformity of national cha- 
racter may be produced out of the most foreign 
materials ; but the fine points of the individual 
must be all filed down ; the original conception of a 
destined profession or calling can barely be enter- 
tained ; and though the average ability of six-tenths 
of the generation may be drawn out by undergoing 
such an education, the highest ability of any one of 
them will rarely recover from the iron pressure of 
uniformity. From such undistinguishable asso- 
ciations and general confusion, the future merchant 
must catch something of the tone of the embryo 
preacher, and the coming sailor imbibe many of the 
mental traits of the prospective lawyer. In a 
merely artistic point of view the result will be a 
gallery of human daguerreotypes, all taken in the 
same attitude, by the same camera, and set out in 
frames of the like pattern and workmanship. 

That this sketch of the social results of unclassi- 
fied schooling in America is not merely fanciful, we 
have had recently an illustration in the pettifogging 
of the captor of Messrs. Mason and Slidell. That 
the lower arts of mercantile success have penetrated 
even to the pulpit, one need only consult the ad- 
vertising and editorial columns of the New York 
newspapers. The theatre is not more absolutely 
under the direction of managers and joint-stock 
directors than the popular pulpit in that and other 
large cities. In the selection of their topics the 
new school divines are not at all behind Mr. Barnum 
himself in their greedy appetite for novelties and 
monstrosities. A wreck at sea, a fire in the city, 
the sentimental suicide of a pair of guilty lovers, 
are texts more taking than any contained in the 
Pentateuch or the Holy Gospels. The jam at a 
" fashionable church " is quite equal to the jam at 



12 



" the opera," and the sensation newspaper of Mon- 
day morning cannot go to press without a report of 
the sensation sermon of the day before. By this 
alliance the demagogue of the Lord's day contrives 
to divide the empire of the demagogue of the laity. 
The puff preliminary of Saturday, the performance 
of Sunday, and the published report of Monday, 
enable him to halve the week with the worldlings 
and self-seekers, whom he has forgotten to combat, 
and can no longer pretend to condemn. 

Among the many influences which, in the absence 
of customary safeguards, have been working a radi- 
cal change in the character of the Americans — 
taking as their standard, Washington and his co- 
temporaries — we must not overlook the steam-press, 
with its morning, noonday, and evening issues. The 
steam -press is largely an American invention, and, 
in its present wonderfully improved form, an in- 
vention of the last twenty years. In no country in 
the world has it had such absolute freedom and so 
universal a patronage as in the North American 
States and cities. Some curious statist estimated a 
few years ago that there were issued in New York 
alone each morning, newspaper sheets enough to 
cover twenty-seven superficial acres ! Editions of 
50,000 copies per day, and upwards, have been 
claimed by the better known penny and twopenny 
journals. Imagine the vast inflation of ideas which 
must have followed from such production and such 
consumption ! Imagine what a power for evil an 
able man, without a conscience, may derive by 
sitting behind an untaxed penny press, driven by 
steam ! Neither the Athenian nor Roman orators, 
nor the popular preachers during the Crusades nor 
at the Reformation, ever wielded so tremendous an 
engine. If American public opinion often betrays 
a childish petulance, a sad indifference to life and 
character, and a barbarian relish for mere specta- 



13 



cular excitement, to the American penny press, all- 
powerful as it has been in the formation of that 
opinion for the last twenty or thirty years, we may 
fairly trace the principal cause of such deplorable 
and dangerous caprices. 

If anywhere, most assuredly in that state of 
society where it was practically exempt from all 
other law, the popular press ought to have tried to 
be " a law unto itself." If anywhere, its members 
ought there to have striven to raise their calling to 
the dignity of a profession, by surrounding them- 
selves with some of those safeguards which the bar 
and faculty still retain as essential to professional 
respectability. Association might have remedied 
what the law could not well reach. I am not, as 
you may suppose, about to discuss the relative 
merits or demerits of avowed and anonymous 
writing, or any other modification of the Press- 
that would take us quite too far out of our proper 
path. I will only invite you, in order to aid your 
estimate of the revolution in ideas and in manners, 
to consider for a moment the mental contrast be- 
tween an average American of the year 1760, whose 
favourite reading was the Bible and Bunyan, and 
Fox's " Martyrs," with an average American of 
these days, whose vade mecum is the Rowdy Journal, 
or some novelette weekly, filled with maudlin love 
stories and exploits of pirates and burglars. 

As if to confirm the foolish pride which almost 
all Americans took in the moral and social revolution 
at work within their country, its material condition 
from the Peace of Ghent (1818) to the election of 
Mr. Lincoln was one of unexampled and apparently 
unlimited prosperity. Those radical changes in the 
character of the population to which I have referred 
must be for good, else how did commerce increase ? 
— why was money abundant ?— how came population 
to advance so rapidly? These were the arguments 



14 



and assurances with which the more thoughtful 
minds among that people were satisfied or silenced, 
whenever an unquiet apprehension arose within 
them, least, peradventure, in making their society 
as independent and as unlike Europe as possible, 
the)' might not be stripping themselves too bare of 
ancient usages and ancestral prejudices. Nor have 
I lately seen any marked indications that such a 
suspicion has been revived or confirmed by the 
calamities of the Civil War. If it exists among the 
better educated minds, it has not as yet found any 
very emphatic public expression ; though it is pos- 
sible it may do so, even while this letter is on its 
way to you, in Australia. 

With the common run of North Americans, on 
the contrary, it has been the invariable assumption 
that, as a people, they have not radically changed. 
They seem to receive as gospel every commonplace 
compliment on their fidelity to the example of their 
" revolutionary fathers." In the maintenance of the 
broad simple theory of their institutions — that they 
shall be democratic and electoral, rather than mon- 
archical or subordinated into classes — I believe they 
do hold with the more advanced revolutionists of 
1776, and even go beyond them. But in most of 
their other notions, as to the constitution and ad- 
ministration of the Government — as to the Execu- 
tive office, the settlement of new territories, the 
reserved rights of the States, the management of 
the finances, the appointment and prerogatives of 
the Supreme Court — as to the elective judgeship, the 
dignity and duty of ambassadors, the limits of con- 
sular authority, and the whole of their views in re- 
lation to popular education and popular interference 
w^ith the constituted authorities — I think it might 
easily be demonstrated that they are much farther 
removed from the example of their ancestors of 
1776 than that cautious and ceremonious generation 



15 



were from that of their ancestors, who took part in 
the English revolution of 1688. Do I argue from 
this, simply because they have so far departed from 
the wavs of their fathers, that therefore this genera- 
tion of Americans must necessarily be in all respects 
in the wrong? By no means. But I do contend, 
having so changed, and yet being so ignorant of their 
change, that they have not yet attained to that 
minimum of self-knowledge which is essential to a 
sustained and stable national character. I do con- 
tend that, in the pursuit of an un-European unifor- 
mity of manners and maxims, they have really 
abandoned a very precious part of the inheritance 
bequeathed them by their colonial ancestors ; and 
I point this moral for the benefit of our fellow 
colonists in your country and in my own, who have 
not yet learned to blush for being the Old World's 
offspring, in whose throats the words " Fatherland," 
" Mother Country," do not stick as a confession of 
inferiority or a declaration of base dependence. 

It is not the least striking of the many strange 
characteristics of all American States which have 
separated by force from their original parentage, 
that their present prejudices are precisely in the 
inverse ratio of their former intimacy. Thus the 
most unpopular man (or the man against whom sus- 
picion is most easily roused) in the United States, 
is the Englishman ; as in Mexico it is the Spaniard, 
and in Brazil the Portuguese. But while there 
exists this antipathy, this irritability against the 
Englishman in the Northern States (and, I believe, 
in the Southern also), let me assure you that neither 
Cockney nor Yorkshireman is regarded with con- 
tempt. That sentiment is reserved almost in- 
variably for ' ; the Irish and Dutch" — as the 
Germans generally are called. Some of our old 
friends in Ireland are, I see, falling into the error 
so often repeated, and so bitterly repented in the 



10 



past history of our fatherland, of fancying they have 
a sure ally abroad, where in truth they have no such 
reliance. Very sincere friends and well-wishers 
among Americans, the Irish people, no doubt, have ; 
but that there is, or ever w T as, any such thing as 
a national American sentiment, more friendly to 
Ireland than to Italy, or Egypt, or Russia, or J apan, 
I do not believe. Our friends 4 ' at home," however 
unpleasant may be the truth in this particular, cannot 
learn it, for their own sakes, too soon. 

But to return to our main business. I have not 
touched, as you may observe, on the actual conflict 
between the Slave and Free States — the South and 
the North — nor do I intend to do so. Whatever I 
have felt free to say or to write on the merits of 
that deplorable quarrel, with a proper consideration 
for Canadian interests, has already reached you in 
print. I sympathized from the first, and do still 
(though in a less degree) sympathize with the legiti- 
mate Government at Washington in its death-grapple 
with a most unjustifiable rebellion. But this sym- 
pathy did not lead me the length of inviting an 
invasion of Canada ; nor does it lead me the length 
of desiring peaceable annexation. It does not blind 
me to the follies and bigotries of the cotemporary 
American character; it does not reconcile me to 
their ravenous " manifest destiny ; " nor has it 
utterly extinguished all recollection of the merciless 
social war which I have seen waged on our emigrant 
countrymen, seven short years ago, throughout the 
length and breadth of that then united and pros- 
perous land. When the clouds were darkest over 
Washington I scorned to listen to the promptings 
of retaliation ; but when these clouds have passed 
away in peace (as I trust they may soon pass) 
the States will owe a deep debt of compensation, 
for recent services and previous sufferings, to 
their Irish inhabitants. Will they pay that debt 



17 



when peace ensues ? I trust so ; but I have my 
doubts. 

Nothing could give me (I know you will under- 
stand this feeling) greater satisfaction than to see the 
American people come out of this agony of civil war 
disciplined, moderated, liberalised, and recollected. 
It is as absurd to deny their great energy as to under- 
rate their great resources. But their character as a 
people is still to be made, and they will have reason 
to be thankful for the searching ordeal which has 
fallen upon them, if it can only teach them that 
national reputation cannot be made (as individual 
reputation too often is made among them) by sheer 
force of pretension and puffery. If the Civil War 
teaches them to pitch their tone somewhat lower i« 
the councils of Christendom than was done at 
Ostend — to estimate Europe less arrogantly — to 
remember the presence of other Powers in the Pacific 
and the Atlantic — to look on Spanish America and 
British America more modestly and less avari- 
ciously — they will not have been the first people to 
whom a great calamity has turned out a great 
blessing in disguise. If, also, it subdues that ex- 
treme pride of ?iativism, which led those born on the 
soil of the Union to despise all foreign-born persons 
coining amongst them, even while inviting them to 
come, it will have been still further a blessing to the 
myriads of our original countrymen, who are, while 
I write, in the front of the battle, and who will not, 
we must hope, be left in the rear of the national 
remembrance when all the fighting is over. 

But, however the people of the States may 
choose to read the lesson of their late experience, I 
sincerely trust, my dear Duffy, you will agree with 
me when I say that to Irish settlers in British 
colonies, and other Irishmen about to emigrate, it 
ought not to be an example and a warning given in 
vain. I well remember how, in your excellent 



18 



letter to the T\ev. Dr. Lang, of Sydney, soon after 
your arrival in Australia, you showed it to be the 
part of wisdom, for colonies like yours and ours, to 
work out, patiently and in good faith, their existing 
free institutions. In that spirit I have acted since 
1 transferred my household gods to the valley of the 
St. Lawrence. This letter, with which I now 
trouble you, is a prompting of that same spirit. 
For, though no one respects less those who are 
capable of dropping or picking up their principles in 
a time of panic, I do believe this American boule- 
versement should teach us to cherish our European 
connexion as a blessing second in value only to 
domestic self-government. If I have learned any- 
thing by years of observation in the Free States of 
the adjoining Union, and in these parallel provinces, 
it is that the colonial condition of society, though 
not without follies, exaggerations, and inherent 
weaknesses of its own, has yet compensating advan- 
tages under the present system of locally responsible 
government, which far outweigh all its inconve- 
niences and deficiencies. I have learned, not from 
books merely, but on the spot, and often against the 
grain, that the Republican States, though gaining- 
immediately and immensely by the establishment of 
their independence, starting into existence with a 
population of three millions to half a continent, 
have yet bled internally, and suffered most severe 
social losses by their too early, too angry, and too 
complete severance from the common body of 
Christendom, and common stock of Old World 
ideas, traditions, and usages. They have gone on 
their way, however, and are now beyond remedy as 
to the forfeited deposit of their civilization. I know 
the more sanguine among them maintain that it is 
their mission to establish a " new civilization," the 
tripod of which shall fling its creative and fructifying 
light from Boston over all the new regions of the 



19 



earth, Arctic and Antarctic. How far recent events 
may have chastised this folly out of the Lyceum- 
bred imagination, [ do not pretend to say ; but I 
assure you it is seriously upheld by all " the Hundred 
Boston Orators/' not to speak of the professors, 
" poets," and paragraphists. For us, free colonists, 
speaking the English speech, the most valuable in- 
struction they can afford us, in my poor opinion, 
they have already given. Their vain proclamations, 
rightly weighed, are words of warning. Their social 
discoveries are often fatal secrets, over which our 
wiser ancestors would have made the Sign of the 
Cross. Their irreverent youth and independent 
matronage are not moral improvements to be 
desired. Their inbred contempt for " foreigners " 
is fit only for the latitude of Pekin. Their State 
school system seems to me false in its basis, and 
fatal in its effects. While, last of all, the examples 
set by their recent political men are examples for 
the most part devoutly to be avoided. But of this 
enough. 

Believe me, 

My dear Duffy, 
Always very faithfully yours, 

Thomas D'Arcy M'Gee. 



COX AND WYMAN, PRINTERS, GREAT QUEEN STREET, LONDON, 



t\1 



i 



